Category Archives: Website tools

One of my blogs here which I’ve failed to support due to the lack of time really needs to be created: top10lists.wordpress.com Unfortunately, there’s no real alternative to Alexa when it comes to top websites…nobody finds it profitable yet to constantly give us an idea of trends on websites. Of course there are all the social websites out there that aggregate links and keep track of them, but unfortunately, they are all different because of the different populations. I wish someone would aggregate them and provide a list of new and interesting websites…then again, maybe they serve that function as well.

I haven’t been more impressed with a Collaboration tool than I have with activeCollab found here: http://www.activecollab.com I discovered the tool after signing up for 37 Signal’s BackPackIt tool for 3 months — boy, I wish I would of waited on paying that fee to 37 signals! BackPackIt is a good tool, but against a free application like activeCollab, it fails hands down. I mean, activeCollab has more features from what I can tell & again, the price tag? FREE….can I repeat it again? FREE, FREE and one more time for the record FREEEEEEEE!

You just have to install it onto your website for people you are working with on a project or business & it’s incredible. It’s relatively young in development & so it still has a ways to go, but it’s great for one of the first releases. It hasn’t even gotten to 1.0 & it’s pretty decent.

Anyway, this is my plug for the tool…so they get more support & I get more features later on. No affiliate marketing here…not a single penny earned, but honestly, I’d invest if I had the money. Some day I may since I can use their tool to build them.

Basically, I was thinking about the “Verification Systems” that most companies use when signing up for new accounts or making posts on Wiki or another publicly available CMS or other public collaboration. Well, I was wondering why they couldn’t just display a color and then have the user type in the color of the image. So, if it was red, obviously, you type in “red.” However, you don’t spell red in German “r-e-d” — I believe it’s “rot” or something similar. So, the color or image thing actually is defeated by globalization. At least with the jumbled up characters, people know in almost any language you’re just writing that into the verification box. The only caveat I would say is that sometimes the directions are in English for a foreigner. However, I think it’s becoming a standard for people that don’t even speak or read it can probably understand what they have to do. It’s become uniform.

So, back to the drawing board with this idea. Rather, some might just say “duhhhhhh”…some may not & that’s why I’m going to put it in the category of “back to the drawing board instead for learnings. I think we need to learn why some things are implemented and others are not. Some people say I have a knack for explaining it — thus, the posts. Happy surfing!